Ellie just walked. She didn’t answer. Jackson seemed so nervous that anything she said might just make him worse. This was probably the first time he’d had any direct contact with their corporate headquarters, she thought. Or indirect contact, really, she supposed, but Jackson didn’t know that.
Ellie walked, and pretended to listen, hoping he’d quieten down on his own, and stop talking about food. She hoped, but he didn’t. Every so often she glanced back at Sameh, making sure she was still there.
Sameh was just following along, looking around, trying to look placidly terrifying. Apparently some of Sameh’s earliest memories were of old-time special forces soldiers, real special forces, from an actual nation-state’s army, and what had impressed her the most was their relaxed, attentively curious manner. They had seemed almost innocent, unabashedly nosy, and careless about their own personal security. That manner had impressed her as a child. Later, thinking back, Sameh had realized they’d been so aware of their perimeter security they hadn’t needed to seem to care about what was close to them, and she’d also realized their nosiness was cultivated, a sham-innocence to disarm others, and she had seen its value and had cultivated it herself. She walked behind Ellie, and looked at things as she did. Signs and passing people and the view out the building’s windows. She stared at Jackson sometimes, too, when he said especially odd things. Mostly at the back of his head, since he was walking ahead of her, which probably didn’t have quite the effect she hoped, but she stared.
And Jackson kept talking.
Jackson wouldn’t stop talking. Ellie wished he’d shut up. He was mostly talking about food, which was just rude, and how wonderful dirt-grown food was. Of course, he said, it did look like it had been made in the ground, and yes it came from markets where it was handled by vendors, and could have been touched by anyone, absolutely anyone, and yes it was sometimes still crusted in dirt. But dirt could be washed off, and food could be sterilized thoroughly, and the benefits of eating that way were extraordinary. All the personnel here, at the base, had become quite taken by the idea of traditional food, he said. It was good for morale, and gave them all something to do, rather than just opening packets.
As he said that, Ellie suddenly understood what was going on. Jackson was thinking about performance reviews. He didn’t know who Ellie was, or why she was here. He didn’t know, because he didn’t need to know, so he was being safe and talking up his management innovations to someone he thought was from head office. Ellie wondered if she should say something, but decided not to disappoint him. He’d probably be happier not knowing. He kept talking. He was still embarrassed by his earlier bad manners too, she thought, and seemed almost guilty about his peculiar diet, now he’d been caught at it by someone from headquarters.
He was obsessed with his diet. He was talking about it far too much. He began talking about slicing and boiling and peeling food, and the quaint old ways they were all embracing, and finally Sameh seemed to have heard all that she could stand.
“For fuck’s sake,” she said, suddenly. “That just sounds disgusting.”
Jackson looked back at her, quite shocked, apparently upset. He swallowed, and then went quiet and after that didn’t say any more.
Ellie wondered if she should say something reassuring, so he didn’t feel too bad. She decided not. He was a long way from anywhere here, stuck at an outpost at the end of the world, and a reminder of how civilized people behaved politely might be useful for him next time someone visited. For the visitor’s sake, if not his.
She grinned at Sameh, though, when Jackson wasn’t looking, and Sameh made a little mocking half-bow as she walked, and seemed quite pleased with herself.
It wasn’t even that Sameh was particularly fussy, Ellie thought. Neither of them could really be as fussy as most people about what they ate. Not while working in the backward parts of the world that they did. Ellie wasn’t utterly nauseated by the idea of eating dirt-grown food rather than processed, or of using non-automated bathrooms, or of touching other people, or doors, or even of toilets that didn’t flush on their own and taps that needed physical contact. She didn’t think she was squeamish. She was a solider. She’d eaten some odd things when she had to, and used a hole in the ground as a toilet. She wasn’t horrified to know that some people ate food which had been made in the ground, where animals and people shat. She wasn’t nauseated by the idea of food being grown rather than manufactured, not nauseated like her parents or the people she had grown up with in Australia would be nauseated, but she wasn’t entirely comfortable with it all either, and would rather not have things like this thrown in her face.
And it wasn’t that Sameh especially minded what Jackson ate either, not the way that a person from Shanghai or Lagos would probably mind. It was more just that he talked about it so very, very much, and Sameh just preferred not to think about things like this, Ellie supposed. To not think about where things she ate came from, and who had touched old-style doors before she pushed them open. Ellie preferred not to think about all that either.
The problem was fixed, though. Sameh had shut Jackson up. He was suddenly subdued. They all walked in silence, through the base, apparently heading for the operations centre.
*
Jackson had organized a meeting to brief Ellie and Sameh on the local tactical situation, but there was some kind of delay getting started. He was terribly sorry. He said they would start very soon, and apologized for the wait. He was just gathering up the last of the people he needed, he said, and then they would begin.
Ellie was tempted to tell him to brief her anyway, or to ask why he hadn’t had his team ready when she and Sameh landed, if the team was that important. She was tempted, just to make trouble, but she didn’t actually do either. She wanted him operationally effective, not having a meltdown about how he’d ruined his career underperforming for the head office visitors, and she still felt a little bad for him, too, after his embarrassment over his manners. She didn’t want to upset him any more than she had, especially when she wasn’t entirely sure the delay was all his fault. In fairness to Jackson, an overly security-conscious Shanghai office might not have given him very much warning that Ellie and Sameh were on their way. Not much warning, like none at all, until Ellie and Sameh were actually on the ground. They had done things like that to Ellie before, and she suspected they had again. Jackson had seemed quite rushed when he had come out to meet them at the plane.
Ellie didn’t make trouble. She didn’t lay blame. Instead, she just told Jackson not to worry, and that they weren’t in that much of a rush.
Sameh opened her mouth at that, probably just to be difficult, but Ellie glared, and she closed it again.
Ellie smiled at her, grateful.
Ellie was feeling generous. She was feeling good about herself. She was enjoying suddenly feeling important, and having everyone running around after her. She was also fairly sure that after this mission it was never going to happen again, so she wanted to make the most of it, and take pleasure in it, and not to be awful to her apparent subordinates just because she could.
Ellie stood there for a moment, then asked Jackson where they were meeting. There was a wired conference room inside the operations centre, he said, and showed her and Sameh to it. It was a room, with chairs and screens and a large table filling most of the center. Ellie sat down at the table. It was powered, and had an corporate promo video playing while it waited for interaction. She waved her hand above the screen until it noticed her, and then found a map of the local area.
It was an interactive map, with data overlays from drones and the sensor net. Ellie found the wall, and found marked data points along it. She tapped, and live video feeds opened, floating above the part of the map the camera was pointed towards. There were high-res cameras on towers at the base and on the wall, Ellie realized, and here, in the operations centre, she could control them remotely and see over the wall. There were moving cameras marked too, what must be airborne drones. Moving camera
s, with a much higher viewpoint, and much poorer resolution.
Ellie looked at the video feeds, curious, wondering what they were going into, but she couldn’t actually tell very much from looking. The Měi-guó side looked mostly the same as the Canadian side did. The same kinds of scenery and mountains and trees.
She fiddled with the map, working out where she was, and where roads went, and what the largest nearby towns seemed to be.
There were a few people in the room, now, waiting around the walls respectfully. Not interrupting Ellie while she did her important-person things, Ellie thought, and not distracting the table while she worked on it, either. Their caution made her want to smile. She liked having that respect. She’d never been an important visitor before, so she fiddled, and looked, and pretended to be doing something terribly important, and tried not to smile while she carefully ignored the people around the walls.
Eventually Ellie ran out of things to poke at. The tagging on the maps was fairly minimal this far from anywhere. She had overlays for roads, and wireless network coverage, and that was about it. She panned around. On the visual map she could see several large clusters of buildings near a road and quite close to the wall, on the Měi-guó side, and presumably in the direction they would be heading. When she tapped for more information, nothing came up to explain what they were.
“Are these refugee camps?” she said, to the room in general.
“Transient debtor camps,” Jackson said, which was almost the same thing, but not quite.
Not quite because it meant the people living there would be poorer and more desperate than actual refugees. Transient debtors couldn’t work for pay, not as part of the legal economy, because they weren’t yet registered in the local area, so their cost-of-living adjustments hadn’t been calculated. Anything they earned would be garnished in full, right away, and transferred to their creditors wherever they had come from. Most of them tried to register, of course, but getting registered was the complicated tangle of bureaucracy that any social service provision was designed to be. No local authority wanted registered debtors on their books, because of the administrative paperwork that went with them, and that was especially so this close to the wall, where there were millions of them wandering around.
It wasn’t a pleasant life, and Ellie felt a little sorry for the debtors, but they weren’t really her problem. She felt sorry for the stone-age hajjis in Afghanistan, too, but it didn’t stop her operating around and through them when she had to. She looked at the map a little more carefully, remembering where the greatest concentrations of debtors were, and decided that whatever else she and Sameh did, they would avoid those camps.
She went back to looking at the video feeds, especially that of the roads, trying to guess how good the transport net was from how rough the road surface looked in the video. Probably not very good, she decided. It might not have been repaired in quite a while. Like Afghanistan, she thought, which meant travelling slowly, and very uncomfortably, anywhere they went.
She made a few notes, and glanced up at Jackson. He’d noticed her typing and handed her a tablet to transfer the file to. She flicked the file over, and put the tablet in her trousers pocket, and then she looked around. The room still wasn’t full. Sameh was just sitting there, glaring at people fairly randomly. Jackson was still standing near Ellie. Everyone else kept waiting against the walls, except a single assistant who was doing meeting-prep things, linking personal tablets to the main wallscreens, and setting out loaner note-taking tablets and drinking water and glasses.
The assistant put a glass down beside Ellie, and handed one to Sameh.
Ellie looked at the glass, surprised. She didn’t quite know what to say. They really had all gone pretty native here, she thought. An actual water glass was getting a little bit uncivilized.
Jackson appeared beside her. He must have seen Ellie’s face, and the glass, and realized what she was thinking. He was quick. Ellie really only had time to be surprised before Jackson had stepped forward, and taken the glass away, and replaced it with a bottle, sealed and clean.
Ellie opened the bottle, and said, “Thank you,” to Jackson.
The assistant looked embarrassed. Jackson didn’t, Ellie noticed. He just looked pleased with himself. Which was good, she supposed, for his morale and operational effectiveness and everything. She was empowering the in-theatre local commander who she might be depending on later, which was probably something it said to do in some kind of manual or another which she hadn’t read.
Ellie sipped water from the bottle. She glanced around and saw the room was finally filling up.
She also saw that Sameh had kept hold of the glass the assistant had given her, despite Jackson placing a water bottle beside her elbow. Sameh waited until Ellie was looking at her, and then drunk from the glass, quite deliberately. She drank, and then grinned, waiting for some reaction.
“I’m not kissing you until you wash your mouth,” Ellie said quietly.
“I know,” Sameh said, smugly, and sipped again.
A few more people came into the room.
“I think we’re ready,” Jackson said to Ellie.
Ellie ignored him, just because. She kept them all waiting for a few more moments, while she looked at nothing in particular on the map. To keep Jackson from getting too self-satisfied and overconfident, and also so she could feel important for just a little longer.
“All right,” she said, when she felt like she’d made them all wait long enough. “Let’s start.”
She looked up at Sameh, who was grinning, and obviously trying not to laugh. Sameh knew exactly what Ellie had just been doing, but seemed to find it endearing.
Ellie didn’t care. If you couldn’t have fun doing a job like this, you were lost. Utterly lost.
She grinned back.
*
The meeting wasn’t especially useful, and could probably have been more easily handled by email, but it was polite to let the local staff think they were involved, so Ellie resigned herself to sitting through it.
Mostly, it was being told that no-one knew anything useful, without anyone being so brave as to actually say so in that many words. It was largely a waste of time, but Ellie listened politely anyway, and nodded when she seemed to be expected to, and kicked Sameh under the table to make her sit still.
Then, once everyone seemed to have had a turn speaking, she cleared her throat and asked about the actual plan.
“The plan?” someone said. “Don’t you…”
“For infil,” Ellie said, and wanted to add, obviously.
Jackson stepped in again. He was thinking quickly now. He started to talk, speaking to Ellie, explaining their usual practice, which they would use if she had no objections. Ellie and Sameh would be flown over late that night, he said, when watchers on the other side of the wall were most likely to be asleep or inattentive.
“There’s watchers?” Ellie said, surprised.
“There can be. Smugglers, or anti-debt activists. Either try to monitor us.”
“Oh,” Ellie said. It was more like Afghanistan than she’d expected. “Okay,” she said quickly, before Jackson mentioned anything about air defense and missiles and got Sameh upset. “Go on.”
Once they were past the main wall sensor net, Jackson said, they would be covered visually by drones operating out of this base at first, but those had a limited range, so the cover would switch to satellites, probably after a day or so. That meant longer response times, and delays if they needed fire support, but there would be extraction teams on standby at the base, and comms gear was sat-linked, so retrieval would only ever be as long as the flight time from this base, even though that might still be longer than was ideal.
Ellie listened, and nodded, and said she understood.
Jackson stopped talking, and looked relieved.
“And our equipment?” Ellie said.
It should be ready, Jackson said. Anything she needed. And anything that wasn’t already here, they could
easily get.
Ellie looked at him for a moment, and wanted to sigh. That would also have been better said in an email hours ago, too, she thought. Just in case she did need an armored attack drone shipped in, or a dirty nuke or something. She didn’t say so, though. She just nodded, and went on.
“I need briefings on the region of Měi-guó opposite us,” Ellie said. “Groups and players and who hates who. All the usual.”
“We have a lot…”
“So send it all,” Ellie said. “Everything. Any intel you have. Send it to a tablet and I’ll read it when I can. And make sure one of the local analysts is always around too. Here, in the op centre. Someone I can ask questions if I need to.”
Jackson nodded, and said he would organize it.
Ellie looked around, and waited for anyone else to speak, but that seemed to be all, so she stood up and said thank you for their time, and then she and Sameh went with Jackson to get their gear.
*
There was an armory on base, and all modern military equipment was infinitely adjustable and had storable settings, so everything Ellie and Sameh needed could be customized from standard equipment on-site, without them having to ship their actual own gear all over the world.
It was a clever system. It was a useful system. Ellie was sometimes almost surprised it worked as well as it did.
Their personnel files had their measurements for everything from clothing and shoe sizes down to the length of their hair, for sizing the internal volume of helmets, and their finger-length and strength, for setting the tension of triggers. They both also had their preferences saved for everything imaginable, not just weapons and clothes, but fabric finishes and colors and the scent of the impregnated anti-odor treatment, the type of boot soles they liked and the amount of fill for their sleeping bags, the snacks for their food packs and the flavor of the liquid in their sippers. Ellie just drank water, but Sameh liked a particularly vile sparkling grape flavor, and she also ate more sugary food in-theatre than Ellie did, and it all just quietly happened without either of them having to think about it.
The Debt Collectors War Page 5
